Farach-Carson named associate vice provost for research

Farach-Carson named associate vice provost for research

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

Mary “Cindy” Farach-Carson will become Rice’s first associate vice provost for research next year.

She is currently director of the Center for Translational Cancer Research at the University of Delaware in Newark, Del.

This new position will have a strong focus on building collaborations between Rice and local biomedical research and education institutions through the Collaborative Research Center (CRC), which is scheduled to open in 2009, and more broadly.

	MARY “CINDY” FARACH-CARSON

“Cindy Farach-Carson will play a key role in fostering Rice’s collaborative efforts with the Texas Medical Center and other regional institutions in the broad spectrum of biomedical and health research and education,” said Jim Coleman, vice provost for research. “She will help provide scientific leadership and vision for the CRC and also help expand our efforts to support faculty research activities.”

In addition to the George R. Brown School of Engineering and the Wiess School of Natural Sciences, potential collaborations at Rice range from psychology and neuroscience in the School of Social Sciences to medical ethics in the School of Humanities and health-care and medical policy at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Coleman said.

The new associate vice provost will also oversee Rice’s involvement with the newly forming Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

“Cindy’s extensive experience in developing collaborations seems custom-made for the role she will be taking on at Rice,” Coleman said.

As the founding director of the Center for Translational Cancer Research, Farach-Carson established a formal alliance of the University of Delaware/Delaware Biotechnology Institute, the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center at Christiana Care and the Nemours/Al duPont Hospital for Children in 2005. The center fosters a fully functional academic and research partnership with the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University — the state of Delaware’s official medical school.

“Before the center was created, no coordinated network existed in Delaware to unite local cancer researchers with clinicians with a common focus on developing new cancer treatments or identify new cancer biomarkers for population screening, prevention, personalized medicine and risk management,” Farach-Carson said. “We now have a center ‘without walls’ to transform clinical, educational and basic scientific efforts in translational cancer research within the state of Delaware into a cohesive effort aimed to reduce the impact of cancer on families and businesses throughout the state.”

Farach-Carson spent a year on sabbatical at the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center to learn from the physicians’ perspective what clinicians need from research. “Instead of sitting in an ivory tower thinking we knew what the clinicians needed and writing a grant proposal based on that assumption, we now bring together physicians, engineers, cell biologists, molecular biologists and other specialists so we can agree on a complex clinical problem and the solution that will provide something useful for the biomedical community,” she said.

Including graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs on these collaborative teams helps ensure that the projects are seen through to completion, Farach-Carson said.  Also important is developing the infrastructure and paperwork to make such projects easy so that researchers do not have to start from scratch each time they want to initiate a study.

Farach-Carson is a researcher herself, which benefits her administrative role with fostering  collaborations. One of her current research collaborations involves engineering artificial salivary glands for cancer patients whose glands are destroyed while receiving radiation treatment of the head and neck. “Life without spit is not much fun,” she said. “You can’t enjoy a meal or a glass of wine.”

She will conduct research at Rice as a professor of biochemistry and cell biology. Her faculty appointment will be split 50-50 with her administrative position. 

Farach-Carson, a native of Galveston, Texas, received a B.S. in biology magna cum laude from the University of South Carolina in 1978 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1982 from the Medical College of Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she also was a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry. She also served as a postdoctoral fellow in physiological chemistry at Johns Hopkins University and in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

She taught at Baylor College of Medicine for a year before joining the faculty at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in 1988. She became an associate professor in the Department of Basic Sciences, Section of Biochemistry, at the UTHSC Dental Branch, an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Urogenital Oncology at U.T.’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and member of the UTHSC Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

Farach-Carson left Houston in 1998 to join the faculty at the University of Delaware in Newark, where she is now a professor of biological sciences and materials sciences. She served as coordinator for the five-year renovation of research and teaching space in a campus building and also planned the building of a laboratory for the Center for Translational Cancer Research. She became the center’s director in 2005. She is a member of the University of Delaware Research Council and the state’s Delaware Cancer Consortium.

Farach-Carson grew fond of Rice during the years she worked across the street at U.T., and she has been coming to the campus to teach part of the tissue-engineering course every summer since she left Houston.

Her  husband, Dan Carson, has been appointed Rice’s new dean of Natural Sciences (see related story), effective Jan. 1, but Farach-Carson will not be moving to Houston until next summer so that the youngest of their four children can finish high school in Newark, Del.